Broadcaster and TV personality Phil Donahue, who died Aug. 18 at age 88, was once busted by Catholic News Service.
Not for a theological or moral lapse. It was just basic CNS reporting.
In June 1991, the product of 16 years of Catholic education, including the University of Notre Dame, by then a much-admired Emmy-winning star of daytime TV talk, wrote an essay, “Confessions of a Fallen Schoolboy,” distributed by Universal Press Syndicate to hundreds of American newspapers.
In it, Donahue included a letter to a deceased nun, Sister Mary Andrew, from his elementary school: “The other day someone told me you had died. The guilt I feel for not having thanked you looms large in my chest today.” An illustration showed what appeared to be a note from 1953 from the nun to Phillip (as Donahue’s full first name was spelled).
Mercy Sister Mary Ann Walsh, then a CNS reporter, saw a routine article in this. So she called Donahue’s school, Our Lady of Angels in Cleveland, to get a story about Sister Mary Andrew.
There was one teeny problem: The school had never had a teacher by that name.
Sister Mary Ann somehow got Donahue on the phone. And the truth came out: There was a real nun, but Donahue had used pseudonyms for everyone in the essay.
“This was a personal essay which came from the heart and recalled the hard work and dedication of the nuns who played such an important role in my early Catholic childhood,” Donahue told Sister Mary Ann.
Possibly unaware of how these words would look in print, he added, “I changed the names of the nuns to protect the innocent.”
Donahue was not usually sentimental about his Catholic upbringing in the staid postwar era, however. He blamed both the culture of the Church and the mores of the times for fostering his sexism, a type of paternalistic racism and also the insular workaholism that he believed led in 1975 to the end of his first marriage to wife Mary Cooney, whom he had married in 1958.
The couple had one daughter and four sons, and he did not seek an annulment. In 1991, he complained to USA Today, “The process is medieval and un-Christian.” He found stability in 1980 with his second (civil) marriage to actress Marlo Thomas.
After his graduation from Notre Dame, Cleveland-born Donahue worked as a radio announcer and news interviewer in Dayton, Ohio. He launched his eponymous talk show there in 1967.
The program had what was, at the time, a unique feature: Donahue would seek audience questions as he roamed the studio. Lacking the budget to book celebrity guests, he instead turned to current events, politics, personal advice and faith-related topics.
His very first guest was atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, famed as the woman responsible for ending prayer in public schools.
The syndicated series’ target audience was made up of what were then called stay-at-home housewives. They seem to have particularly appreciated Donahue’s often-stated belief that women had ideas deserving of attention.
In 1974, the show moved to Chicago, where it achieved its greatest fame, airing on more than 200 stations. Eleven years later, it moved to New York. The last episode was broadcast in 1996. An attempted revival in 2002 lasted only seven months.
In an era before the likes of Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones came to the fore by exploiting domestic squalor and studio fistfights, Donahue’s programs were known for their thoughtful exploration of topics on the leading edge of events. As early as 1988, for example, he aired his first program on the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.
Many articles written just after his death claimed Donahue described himself a lapsed Catholic. But he seldom actually used that term, preferring to characterize himself as disappointed or disillusioned.
In 1986, he told The Associated Press that he had not lost his faith, with the reporter writing “but he has lost confidence in the ways of the Church that nurtured him. That saddens him.”
Donahue said his Catholic education had given him “encouragement to think for myself.”
His estrangement did not originate in college but rather in Dayton, where he was active in his parish, the Church of the Incarnation, in nearby Centerville. There, he served on the parish council and the communications committee. He even found time to edit the parish newspaper.
His growing awareness of racial inequality in the early 1960s changed him. In 1983, he told an interviewer, “I began to recognize that most Catholics then were kneeling down and praying, and that if there was a God, he obliges us to stand up and do, not to kneel down and pray.”
In addition, Donahue said he had begun to see that the Church “was slow to realize the horrendous immorality of the Vietnam War.”
Donahue advocated for voluntary busing to end school segregation. And he joined a local protest, which included picketing, against plans to build a new Church edifice for his Centerville parish that would cost $1 million.
Donahue and other objectors believed that money would be better spent in service to the needs of African Americans and people in poverty. The protest was unsuccessful, and the new Church was built in 1965.
In his 1979 autobiography, “Donahue: My Own Story,” he wrote of his growing suspicion that parts of his Catholic upbringing had been both racist and sexist. “I castigated the Dayton Catholic Women’s Club for its ‘lily-whiteness.’”
He added, “My point was that we all had come out of a racist environment and that the time had come to realize that none of us could claim to have completely escaped it.”
Reviewing the memoir in the Toledo Blade, entertainment editor Norman Dresser – who had known Donahue since his Dayton years – wrote, “Donahue is a morally upright man ... he’s also a canny infighter and a fiercely competitive man.”
